Worldwide Pride Month events are underway but they are coming at a time when many people who identify as LGBTQ+ say they are facing increasing difficulties at work, ranging from being repeatedly misgendered to physically assaulted.
June Meissner poses for a photo at the Boise Public Library in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, June 6, 2024. Meissner, a transgender woman and librarian, blocked a punch from a man yelling slurs while working at the library. June Meissner uses a computer at a workstation on the second floor of the Boise Public Library in Boise, Idaho on Thursday, June 6, 2024. Meissner, a transgender woman and librarian, blocked a punch from a man yelling slurs while working at the library.
Gender nonconforming library workers in particular, like Meissner, are also grappling with growing calls for book bans across the U.S., with books about“When we see attacks on those books, we have to understand that those are attacks on those kinds of people as well,” said Emily Drabinski, who is the president of the American Library Association and is gay.
But co-founder Tiffany Justice says the organization — which she says has more than 300 chapters in 48 states and more than 130,000 active members — is not anti-LGBTQ+, although Justice herself told the AP she thinks that the Q in the acronym, which stands for queer or questioning, “needs to go into the trash bin.” And according to the ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, about 38% of book challenges that “directly originated” from Moms for Liberty activity have LGBTQ+ themes.
Despite the thousands of petitions to censor books about gender and sex, legal standards for deeming materials obscene or harmful to minors — and therefore not protected speech under the First Amendment — are very specific and high, and courts have, according to Vera Eidelman, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union who focuses on rights to free speech in the digital age.
“Public libraries could be offering as many ways as possible to make it less dangerous to learn about yourself, and the law just added another challenge,” Fleming said.
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